Interesting!

I don't know if you know about the categories that exist on some Wikipedias, for instance German and Swedish Wikipedia: namely the categories for articles about men and women respectively. On Swedish you can find the super-category here:

http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategori:Personer_efter_k%C3%B6n

Män = Men
Kvinnor = Women

Those numbers suggest that for each article about a woman on Swedish Wikipedia, there are 4,29 about men. That is a little bit better than the German Wikipedia (1 woman, 5,85 men).

As you can see from the interwiki links, some other languages also have these categories. English Wikipedia in fact have an impressive 1,65 articles about *women* for every article about men. All *38* of the women article towers of the 23 men articles :-) Time to fill in those categories?

Best wishes,

Lennart

Lennart Guldbrandsson,
Wikimedia Sverige http://wikimedia.se
Tfn: 031 - 12 50 48 Mobil: 070 - 207 80 05 Epost: l_guldbrandsson@hotmail.com Användarsida: http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anv%C3%A4ndare:Hannibal Blogg: http://mrchapel.wordpress.com/

Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2011 14:39:30 -0700
From: rkaldari@wikimedia.org
To: joseph.2011@reagle.org; gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Gendergap] fyi: Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica

Thanks for the article link, Joseph. I haven't yet finished the article, but I do have a couple of preliminary questions:

* Do you know what the ratio of male to female contributors is at Encyclopedia Britannica?
* Why the emphasis on female biographies? It seems like a weak indicator of gender bias (as reflected by the WikiSym study). Do we really know that women are significantly more likely to write about women than men are? If so, how much more likely?

Ryan Kaldari


On 9/2/11 6:54 AM, Joseph Reagle wrote:

 

http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/social/wikipedia/gender-bias-in-wp-eb

 

Abstract: Is there a bias in the against women's representation in Wikipedia biographies? Thousands of biographical subjects, from six sources, are compared against the English-language Wikipedia and the online Encyclopædia Britannica with respect to coverage, gender representation, and article length. We conclude that Wikipedia provides better coverage and longer articles, that Wikipedia typically has more articles on women than Britannica in absolute terms, but Wikipedia articles on women are more likely to be missing than articles on men relative to Britannica. For both reference works, article length did not consistently differ by gender.


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